Cleverly by name... Wayne Rooney hugs team mate
Tom Cleverly after scoring. A study shows Premier League footballers are
sharper than most students

Premier League footballers have sharper minds than most university students, according to a new academic study.

Researchers found the top flight players and even elite amateur athletes have better developed cognitive functions than the average undergraduate because they are able to 'hyper-focus'.

The perception study by Professor Jocelyn Faubert, an expert in psychophysics, revealed a possible outcome of the increased cortical thickness that has been found in areas of trained athletes' brains.

The findings also offer researchers new avenues for exploring the treatment of people who have issues with attention, such as the elderly.

Professor Faubert, of the University of Montreal in Canada, said: 'Study participants were asked to describe a series of simulated objects moving through three dimensions.

'Although the context had nothing to do with any specific sport, we found that professional athletes were able to process the visual scenes much better than amateur athletes who were in turn better than the students.'

He said the cognitive requirements for correctly interpreting the abstract moving scenes parallel situations such as driving, crossing the street or performing sport.

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'It would appear that athletes are able to hyper-focus their attention to enhance learning, which is key to their abilities,' he added.

The researchers worked with 102 professional players from the Premier League, the U.S. National Hockey League and elite French rugby teams, as well as 173 elite amateur athletes - recruited from the NCAA American university sports programme and a European Olympic training centre - and 33 non-athlete university students.

Not just a pretty face: The sharp minds of players like David Beckham could be down to the increased cortical thickness that has been found in areas of trained athletes' brains

They undertook the '3D-MOT' task 15 times to evaluate several skills that scientists believe are critical to visual perceptual and cognitive abilities when viewing complex scenes.

HOW ATHLETES' BRAINS 'SLOW DOWN TIME' AT CRUCIAL MOMENTS

Sportsmen have long reported the slowing down of time during crucial match moments.

And their experiences have now been backed up by neuroscientists at University College London, who found that a person's perception of time does indeed seem to slow as they prepare to make a quick play.

The researchers suggest that the brain 'slows down time', processing information at a faster intensity in order to make the right move.

The phenomenon has been reported by footballers, F1 drivers and tennis players, and also for people in life-or-death situations, such as during a car crash or problematic sky-dive.

Dr Nobuhiro Hagura, from the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, told the BBC he first became interested in the phenomena after hearing anecdotes from baseball players in Japan.

He and his team at UCL decided to test the validity of the claims with an experiment involving using volunteers reacting to flashing and flickering discs on a screen. Some volunteers were asked to tap the screen when they saw certain shapes, while others did not need to make a movement.

The participants who were asked to tap the screen felt they had longer to make the action than those who did not need to make any arm movements.

Subjects who were mentally prepared for action also reported a longer sense of perceived time to make the moves.

Tests evaluated their distribution of attention between a number of moving targets amongst distracters, large field of vision, maximum speed of objects they were able to follow, and the ability to perceive depth.

The scene is 'neutral' - meaning that sport specific familiarity such as play knowledge or experience will not influence the score as the movements and interactions are totally random.

The 3D-MOT task was developed by Professor Faubert and can be evaluated by using a graphical simulation machine he invented - known as the 'Neurotracker'.

It has been used by Manchester United as well as teams in the American National Football League and National Hockey League to evaluate potential signings.

The tests revealed that the professional athletes were able to learn how to track fast moving objects at a much superior rate than the other groups, although all three groups improved their score over the 15 training sessions.

Dr Faubert said: 'Clearly, mental processing and learning skills are key to the excellent performance of the professional athletes.

'However, it is unclear whether this superior learning ability is unique to professional athletes, and moreover whether these are innate skills that led them to be selected by these teams, or whether these skills have been acquired through extensive training.

'It will therefore be interesting to see how individuals of all athletic abilities improve their perception score as they train with this system.'